Questions and answers

Chamber and committees

Questions and answers

Parliamentary questions can be asked by any MSP to the Scottish Government or the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body. The questions provide a means for ��˿�� to get factual and statistical information.

Written questions must be answered within 10 working days (20 working days during recess)
Other questions such as Topical, Portfolio, General and First Minister's Question Times are taken in the Chamber

Urgent Questions aren't included in the Question and Answers search. There is a SPICe fact sheet listing Urgent and emergency questions.

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Question reference: S6W-14158

Asked by: Craig Hoy, MSP for South Scotland, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Friday, 20 January 2023
Current Status: Answered by Humza Yousaf on 3 February 2023

To ask the Scottish Government what work it has done with universities and colleges to prepare students for a digitally-enabled health and care environment.

The Scottish Government and the Scottish Funding Council, in partnership with the Digital Health & Care Innovation Centre (DHI), has been working for a number of years to engage with universities and colleges to shape the future workforce for the digital health and care sector. This includes work with Skills Development Scotland, and the FUTUREquipped project with Scotland's colleges:

We will continue to collaborate with partners to identify opportunities to accelerate new entrants into health and care roles. This will involve planning a programme with schools, colleges and universities to ensure curricula prepares students for a digitally enabled health and care sector.

This complements existing work by education providers to ensure curricula prepares students in higher and further education for a modern working environment and is all part of the wider cross sector ‘Digitally-Enabled Workforce’ Programme managed and run by NHS National Education for Scotland, on behalf of the Scottish Government and partners.

Question reference: S6W-14159

Asked by: Craig Hoy, MSP for South Scotland, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Friday, 20 January 2023
Current Status: Answered by Humza Yousaf on 3 February 2023

To ask the Scottish Government what it is doing to ensure that digital skills are regarded as core skills for graduates who are planning to work within health and social care.

Question reference: S6O-01890

Asked by: Craig Hoy, MSP for South Scotland, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Thursday, 02 February 2023
Current Status: Taken in the Chamber on 9 February 2023

To ask the Scottish Government whether it will provide an update on progress towards the launch of the Deposit Return Scheme.

Question reference: S6W-14156

Asked by: Craig Hoy, MSP for South Scotland, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Friday, 20 January 2023
Current Status: Answered by Humza Yousaf on 2 February 2023

To ask the Scottish Government what it has done to develop communities of practice and learning networks, so that staff can share learning about the uses of technology within the health and care sector.

The Scottish Government is committed to developing digital skills for all staff across health and care, and ensuring that we embed digital leadership at all levels to enable digital service transformation. As part of our commitments in the Digital Health and Care Strategy’s Delivery Plan 2022-23 we are developing an Action Plan to articulate the range of learning and development opportunities more clearly, identify gaps and document outcomes. The Digital Health and Care Leadership Programme led by NHS Education for Scotland and sponsored by the Scottish Government supports staff to influence digital health and care in their organisations through strategic leadership, opportunities for learning, collaborating, and networking with others to maximise the use of technology to benefit service delivery within their organisations. The Programme is open to staff in NHS Scotland, social care, housing and the third sector, and will increase capacity in digital leadership, encouraging innovation in services and cross-organisation learning and development.

In addition, we actively contribute to sector events that facilitate information sharing, promote good practice, and encourage learning. For example, the DigiFest programme of events and conference is aimed specifically at those working to deliver digitally enabled services in health, housing, and social care. This year’s programme in October to November 2022 featured a range of sessions highlighting digital developments in health, social care and housing including a focus on available resources and learning networks supporting knowledge and learning among staff.

Question reference: S6W-14166

Asked by: Craig Hoy, MSP for South Scotland, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Friday, 20 January 2023
Current Status: Answered by Humza Yousaf on 2 February 2023

To ask the Scottish Government what it has done to collaborate with and support small and medium-sized digital health and care enterprises to offer a clear product route from development to implementation at scale.

Question reference: S6W-14163

Asked by: Craig Hoy, MSP for South Scotland, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Friday, 20 January 2023
Current Status: Answered by Humza Yousaf on 2 February 2023

To ask the Scottish Government how much it has invested in (a) the Digital Health & Care Innovation Centre (DHI) (b) Innovation Centres other than DHI, (c) The Scotland 5G Centre, (d) the cyber resilience sector, (e) the Centre for Sustainable Delivery and (f) Public Health Scotland to ensure that Scotland gets maximum benefit from digital health and care.

Our commitment in the Digital Health and Care Strategy is to work with these organisations, and others, to realise the potential of digital health and care, not necessarily to provide additional investment.

However, please see the below response in respect of funding that is provided, covering the period of April 2021 to December 2022:

Scottish Government invested £1,306,888 in support of the Digital Health & Care Innovation Centre (DHI). To confirm, the aquaculture and construction innovation centres are not relevant to digital health and care investment. For Precision Medicine Scotland, there was no spend in 2021-22 and 2022-23 figures are not available due to the financial year not yet being complete. Scottish Innovation Centres is funded by the Scottish Funding Council (SFC), detail on SFC spending is available publicly on their website . Given the various funding streams from across Scottish Government to Innovation Organisations it would not be possible to quantify those funds in support of digital health and care related work only.

Scottish Government funding to Public Health Scotland is set out in each year’s Scottish Budget which is publicly available on the Scottish Government’s website: Scottish Budget - gov.scot ( ) Detail on PHS spending is set out within the organisation’s annual accounts which are publicly available on their website. Additionally, we directly provided £1,597,088 in support of various programmes of work relating to Digital Health and Care.

The Scottish Government has allocated £1,132,500 for its strategic work programme to build cyber resilience across sectors, as well as an initial spend during 2022/23 on setting up the Scottish Cyber Coordination Centre.

Since 2021-22, we have provided £2.45 million funding to the Scotland 5G Centre which has contributed to the development and implementation of digital health and care 5G use cases.

The Centre for Sustainable Delivery (CfSD) – In 2021-22 Golden Jubilee/CfSD received allocations from planned care of £5.4m - £3m in programme funding and £2.4m in staffing costs at CfSD. The 2022-23 figures are not available due to the financial year not yet being complete.

Question reference: S6W-14161

Asked by: Craig Hoy, MSP for South Scotland, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Friday, 20 January 2023
Current Status: Answered by Humza Yousaf on 2 February 2023

To ask the Scottish Government how many staff have used the Turas platform in each year since it was launched.

Question reference: S6W-14027

Asked by: Craig Hoy, MSP for South Scotland, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Wednesday, 18 January 2023
Current Status: Answered by Maree Todd on 2 February 2023

To ask the Scottish Government, further to the answer to question S6W-13514 by Maree Todd on 16 January 2023, when it anticipates the Menopause and Menstrual Health Policy Working Group will have developed a menopause and menstrual health workplace policy for NHS Scotland.

Question reference: S6W-14167

Asked by: Craig Hoy, MSP for South Scotland, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Wednesday, 25 January 2023
Current Status: Answered by Humza Yousaf on 2 February 2023

To ask the Scottish Government whether it has a permanent digital testing environment that allows potential new health and care technology to be developed and tested in a safe environment, and, if this is the case, how much was spent on developing it.

Question reference: S6W-14118

Asked by: Craig Hoy, MSP for South Scotland, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Thursday, 19 January 2023
Current Status: Answered by Humza Yousaf on 2 February 2023

To ask the Scottish Government, in light of the commitment in its Digital Health and Care Strategy, how much it has spent on supporting health and social care organisations to have access to the basic resources required to develop as digital organisations, broken down by organisation.

Supporting health and social care organisations to develop as digital organisations takes the form of many different resources and initiatives. This includes, for example, development of guides such as the Digital Telecare Playbook that supports organisations manage the transition to digital telecare. It also includes the skills of staff, and investment in basic infrastructure such as web cameras to enable use of Near Me. These costs are built into budgets for national programmes, and into local organisations budgets for the delivery of digital developments. It is therefore not possible to breakdown funding. This year, in 2022-23 as part of the overall health portfolio investment, we are investing £99.6 million in digital health and care. This covers a huge amount of work ‘behind the scenes’ that is needed to modernise our health and care systems.

This investment in our systems – and the required cyber security, the training of staff to use the systems and the ongoing maintenance and development – takes up most of our budget. The 2022-23 Delivery plan provides further detail on spend across the Digital Health and Care directorate in its support of health and care organisations.